


notes from a catastrophe

by patrokla



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Drug Use, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempts, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Prostitution, Theo Decker; Art Thief, Trauma Recovery, Unreliable Narrator, apocalypse in a very american sense, eat yr heart out john crowley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2020-10-26 18:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 18,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20746439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: “Life, Potter. I always find that I want more of it.”In post-catastrophe Manhattan, Theo investigates a rumor and finds Boris.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of those instant regret situations tbh. I blame it entirely on the passage where Theo considers what the Barbours would be doing in post-catastrophe Manhattan.
> 
> The second part of this is written; I expect the whole thing will be fairly short. (ETA: ha.)
> 
> Updated content warnings for the whole fic: character death (not Theo or Boris), internalized homophobia, explicit references to drug use, dubiously consensual sex, abuse, and suicide attempts. Also, a pretty wobbly middle section, and perhaps an unrealistically hopeful ending.

It’s because deep down I want to love the thing I would love – and not what it is. It’s because I’m still not myself, and so the punishment is loving a world that’s not itself.

\- Clarice Lispector, _Forgiving God_

  
  
  
_mid._  
  
After the initial moment of shock, Boris pours him a cup of tea from the scuffed enamel kettle occupying one of the two stove burners. Theo takes a cautious sip from the mug, and discovers exactly what he’d expected - lukewarm, dark, Russian tea. It’s been oversteeped, heated up multiple times with the tea bags still in, he suspects. Boris watches him out of the corner of his eye, and the heavy restlessness under his skin seems to subside a little as Theo takes another sip.  
  
“Can’t believe,” he starts, knuckles going white as he grips the top of the chair. “No, I can. I hoped it’d be you, one day.”  
  
“It always seems to happen like that,” Theo says, and the casual tone he’s aiming for does exactly what he’d meant it to do, and he regrets it immediately. Boris looks down at the table, hair flopping over his eyes, straight, white teeth worrying at his bottom lip.  
  
“Did you know it was me?” Boris asks, not looking up at him, and Theo takes another sip of tea as he thinks over his answer. Why had he come here at all? To hurt Boris? To indulge his curiosity? Would it hurt him, to tell him the truth? _I suspected, yes, I thought maybe, yes, I’ve thought for months, yes, maybe. I hoped. I was afraid._  
  
It would hurt him, Theo decides, because if the situations had been reversed - Boris wouldn't have let things lie, would've investigated the rumors. And Theo hadn’t, not for a long time.  
  
“I didn’t know,” he says finally, evasively. Half-truth, half-lie. Boris shakes his head and looks up with a hollow smirk that says he hears it for what it is.  
  
“So you don’t know,” he says, shrugging, no big deal, Potter, “But you want it? You think, maybe it’s my friend Boris, maybe just some stupid junkie. Either way, he blows me? Or,” Boris says, dragging his gaze over Theo with too much perception to be lascivious, “maybe he fucks me?”  
  
“No!” Theo says sharply, and then, “No, I didn’t. I was curious.”  
  
It sounds weak, even to his own ears.  
  
“I didn’t,” he says again, airlessly, and Boris laughs, the noise crashing between them. He’s still clutching the top of the chair, all the fine bones of his hands standing out in sharp relief.  
  
“Doesn’t matter,” he says, “It’s a nice change, you know? Usually the other way for me, the fucking.”  
  
Something in Theo’s stomach twists every time Boris says the word, a nauseous feeling, like biting into a hidden rot in a stone fruit. Sickly sweet, brain screaming wrong, wrong, wrong. Boris lets go of the chair and stands up, all slouching angles, hip cocked.  
  
“I’m not,” Theo starts, and he knows where he’s going but he can’t actually get there, can’t finish it. He stares at Boris, feels breath shuttling in and out of his lungs too quickly, shies away from the memories of Vegas. Sweaty, sticky, clumsy limbs. Simple, animal exchanges of pleasure. Something distinct in the haze: Boris biting his shoulder, licking the indents he’d left in Theo’s skin. They’d never kissed, he doesn’t think, but Boris had bitten him sometimes. Animal pleasures.  
  
“They won’t let you stay here all day,” Boris warns him, and he almost flinches at that. The nausea increases at the the reminder that this, whatever awful, dreadful, flytrap of a situation that he’s wandered into is - soon it’ll be over, and he won’t have anything. Just the knowledge that Boris is trapped.  
  
The panic that flutters through him at that thought makes him jerk out of the chair, twitchy and graceless to the extent that Boris looks alarmed.  
  
“You look bad, Potter. Like you’re coming down from something.”  
  
“No,” Theo says, “no, it’s just - we have to get you out of here. I need to think about this.”  
  
Boris is already shaking his head, “No, absolutely not,” emphatic, lank curls flopping across his face, “is no good way. Believe me, I think about it a lot. Every day, but it’s hopeless. Don’t do anything stupid on my account, Potter.”  
  
“You can’t be serious,” Theo says. “I’m not going to leave you here, Boris, my God.”  
  
“Dead serious,” Boris says, and he looks it, eyes dark and flat. “You don’t owe me, Potter, but I’m asking this of you: don’t be fucking stupid when you leave, okay? Tell me.”  
  
“Fuck you,” Theo says, breathless with fury. What does he owe Boris, himself, anyone?  
  
A heavy knock on the door comes before he can come up with an answer.

_pre._  
  
Rewind the tape. Back before he ran into Platt Barbour on the street. Before he finished college. No, too far - after he’d come to Hobie, after he’d carefully placed a secret, worthless package in a storage unit and handed over four thousand dollars in cash to keep it safe. After he comes back again to pay for another two years - four thousand, three hundred this time. Rates going up. Stop. Hit record.  
  
He pays in cash - he’ll come to regret that quite soon, but at the time it seems extremely reasonable. He considers, briefly, unwrapping the painting to see it. It’s been four years since Vegas, and the lustre of the bird’s feathers is beginning to fade slightly in his mind. He runs his fingers over the tape, again and again, comforting himself with the weight of it all. He doesn’t unwrap the painting; does a line of coke, then goes out to pay the bill all bright eyes and quick tongue. The guy behind the desk will shake his head and laugh after Theo walks out.  
  
Between the drugs, the nerves, and the sudden pandemic, it’ll take him several months longer to discover that the painting is gone.  
  
—  
  
Theo doesn’t go to the storage unit until the city is nearly empty, everyone dead or fled. He wouldn’t have gone at all, except that someone tries to break into the shop, a lanky young man who reminds him of Platt in the old days, a sullen, violent, marble-jawed teenager, the kind of idiot who would break into an antiques shop while the world was ending, as though Queen Anne is going to be the currency of whatever society forms afterwards.  
  
Fortunate, that Theo’s sudden intrusion into the burglary is enough to interrupt it. Fortunate, too, that he realizes that if people are breaking into antiques shops, then they’re probably breaking into storage units.

  
He leaves the shop in such a hurry that he almost forgets his gun.  
  
—  
  
It must’ve been Boris. He can’t quite figure out how, how Boris knew, how he’d never realized, but it’s the only thing that makes any sense. Boris, who’d stolen from him so casually, change and food and pencils, and shared everything alike. Boris, who wouldn’t come with him - had that been why?  
  
Not that it matters. It’s not exactly a weight lifted, to know that the thing he’d spent years trying to protect and trying to keep from drowning him entirely, had never been in that storage locker in the first place. But now it’s one less thing to worry about, at a time when caring about something means being willing to take a life over it. He shouts, he screams, he scatters the remnants of tape and newspaper around the concrete floor. Then he goes back to Hobart and Blackwell, and tries to put it all from his mind. His world, ever since his mother’s death, has only narrowed: the painting, Hobie, survival. Now, Hobie and survival.  
  
Another burglary he isn’t there to stop, a man with a gun, Hobie, palms open, trying to de-escalate, a gunshot.  
  
Then it’s down to survival.  
  
—  
  
He leaves Hobart & Blackwell shortly after. It’s only barely a conscious decision, one made after he’d gone downstairs to the shop, where the window was all boarded up, glass and spattered blood on the floor, and realized that he’d spend the rest of his life trying to scrub the bloodstains out of the wood if he didn’t leave right then. He locks up the apartment and the basement, and then, as an afterthought, the shop door, and then he’s gone.  
  
It can be very easy to leave a place behind, but Theo is not so naive as to assume the ghosts won’t come with him. That has never been his experience.


	2. Chapter 2

_mid._   
  
It had started, according to Boris, with a deal gone wrong. He never fully elaborates on it, only in his usual, roundabout, never quite believable way. Theo gleans, over conversations in Boris’s kitchen, twice-steeped tea in a mug with a palm tree on it between his hands, that Boris had fallen in with a bad crowd after he’d left Vegas.  
  
(“I use the painting as collateral, you know, to stay out of big debts, but then I meet this girl, and she introduce me to -“  
  
He doesn’t say the word, usually, but Theo has seen the trackmarks, new ones appearing on Boris’ arms almost every time he comes by.)  
  
Eventually he’d ended up back in New York, strung out, holding it together enough to keep from fucking up jobs (“petty crime,” he’d scoffed, “pathetic, little cons, robberies, break and enter”) until suddenly he wasn’t.   
  
(“I fuck up bad, cops almost discover whole operation in city, very bad. My boss, Mikael, he wants to kill me, but I talk him down.”  
  
“To prostitution?”  
  
“It’s a living,” he shrugs. “Life, Potter. I always find that I want more of it.”)

—

They don't talk about the painting. Boris brings it up once, when they're very drunk, grabbing Theo's hands in his own clammy ones and swearing, swearing, "I would have brought it back to you, Potter, if I'm not waylaid. I never meant -"

And Theo, who dreams by turns about the painting, lost, and Boris shut up in his apartment, _enfermé_, shakes his head until his ears ring and tells him to shut the fuck up.

Boris cries, which is uncomfortable in the thick-tongued silence of the morning after, and kisses the knuckles of his right hand, which is worse.

_pre._  
  
Life. It’s funny, sort of, how much of Theo’s life is what it was before. He’s an appraiser now, not a dealer, and more of jewelry than anything else. He would’ve been unqualified in a world where qualifications could be checked, but he’d known just enough at the start to tell if something was genuine gold or fake, and that’s what people care about in this new world. Second verse, same as the first: gold is, as ever, king.  
  
He works with a lot of criminals, he suspects. Young men coming in with old women’s jewelry, older men calling him out to confirm the authenticity for large payments - payments for jobs he doesn’t know the details to, and doesn’t ask.   
  
He hears about the man who turns out to be Boris on just such a job. It’s for a man he hasn’t worked with before - Mikael’s righthand man, he finds out later, Evgeny, who leads him on a meandering tour through a townhouse on the Upper East Side, asking about gold inlays, rings, a pair of emerald earrings that make him panic, for a moment, thinking of his mother’s, safely in his own apartment in a lockbox under a floorboard. Evgeny talks endlessly, a mumbling stream of consciousness that Theo quickly learns he can tune out, cleaning rings with the antiseptic wipes he keeps in his pocket and dragging the tiniest ones against a ceramic tile to see what mark they leave and trying the bigger ones on, twisting them around his fingers and checking for discoloration.   
  
“Eh, I’m a little short on cash,” Evgeny says sheepishly, when Theo presents him with his results (largely authentic and valuable, although the earrings are worthless, just colored glass and gold enamel paint on brass).   
  
Theo gestures at the jewelry, and Evgeny shifts and shuffles until it becomes clear that he has debts to pay, and while he does appreciate Theo’s work, really -  
  
“I do know of something,” he says, brightening, “might suit a man like you, very busy. I have associate who keeps a boy in the West Side - well, I say boy, but he’s a grown man, maybe around your age. Little crazy, but he’s very good with his mouth. Ukrainians, they can be talented people -“  
  
Theo, caught on ‘boy’ and ‘might suit a man like you’ and ‘Ukrainian’, takes a moment to gather his wits together. He finds himself blushing like a child as he shakes his head.   
  
“I’m not like that,” he snaps, and Evgeny raises his hands, defensive.  
  
“Okay, meant nothing by it,” he says, and that’s that. Theo takes one of the more valuable rings, and the earrings as well, and walks home through nearly-empty streets. The soldiers who are, according to de Blasio, restoring “martial order,” stare at him no matter how resolutely he keeps his thoughts on his dinner plans.   
  
—  
  
Ukrainian pings a bell, though. Sets off an alarm. It’s just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, he tells himself, but suddenly he can’t escape mentions of this boy on the West Side. Evgeny recommends him to several of his friends, possibly as an apology, and they all try to bargain Theo down with vivd descriptions of how good this man is, _blyat, Decker, he will make you forget that he isn’t a woman -_   
  
He hasn’t heard from Boris since the text messages, almost half a decade ago. It almost beggars belief, to imagine that Boris had somehow ended up here, in the middle of an epidemic, no international travel in or out of the country, martial law in place, food shortages, checkpoints throughout the city.   
  
And yet, and yet. Theo keeps a gun in his waistband, trades gold for flatpacks of ramen, and lives in a fifth-floor walkup to dissuade burglars. For the first time in years, he feels Boris’ absence like a living thing. Everywhere he turns, something is moving just out of sight.  
  
—  
  
It’s nearly five months before Theo takes Evgeny up on his offer. He’s at the townhouse again, ostensibly there to advise Evgeny on how to restore an armoire he’d recently acquired, but more, Theo suspects, to show off his spoils to someone who can appreciate them. It’s not the first time Theo’s been called across town to do look through his glasses with a serious, considering gaze and confirm that a client has good taste, and it won’t be the last. He imagines some people find it comforting, in the middle of the end of the world, to make a man in an expensive suit to tell them that they have something beautiful.  
  
When it comes time to pay, Evgeny prevaricates again. Theo watches him with something squirming in his belly, a surprisingly sharp sensation. Anticipation, he realizes, when Evgeny opens his mouth and says, “I know that last time you say no boys, but -“  
  
And Theo shrugs, makes it sound like a generous concession when he says, “Maybe you’re right. It’s been a while.”  
  
“Women can be so difficult in times like this,” Evgeny tells him, all understanding, and Theo smiles, and puts the address that Evgeny writes down in his coat pocket, and walks home trying not to make the scrap of paper in his pocket seem as incriminating as it feels.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting at a reasonable time? I don't know her.

_mid._  
  
Boris doesn’t have a phone. He doesn’t have a phone, or a computer, or anything that enables some line of communication to the outside world - something he seems to consider largely irrelevant to his own life.  
  
“And why it’s so important, I don’t see,” he says one day. He’s standing by the window, elbow on the ledge, smoking a cigarette and looking like he came straight out of a Jacob Riis photograph.   
  
“Because,” Theo starts, and Boris’ skinny shoulders straighten a little at the prospect of an argument, “because what if something happens?”  
  
“Ivan is just down the hall,” Boris says with deceptive placidity. “You know this.”  
  
Theo does know this. Ivan is a regular fixture in Theo’s visits, marking the hours with heavy knocks on the door and non-negotiable ‘reminders’ of exactly how much of Boris’ time Theo has paid for.   
  
“And he has a handle on everything,” Theo says, letting the skepticism bleed through.   
  
“Potter,” Boris says. A warning, just like when they were younger and his father had beaten him. _We’re not talking about the bruises._  
  
“Boris,” Theo returns, “Anyway, what if I want to talk to you?”  
  
“Then you come here,” Boris says, fully impatient with the topic now. “What do you want from this? You want me to say yes, I would like a phone? Or should I tell you that Mikael will take any phones? That he has before?”  
  
Theo, trapped between his sharp look and his tone, just shakes his head.  
  
“Right,” Boris says, “neither of us wants to talk about that. So don’t ask.”  
  
He stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill and immediately goes for the silver cigarette case in his pocket, shaking out another one and lighting it. Theo, suddenly disturbed by the scene, Boris’ skinny arms and the impersonal flicks of his fingers, keeps his eyes on the cigarette case. It’s early 20th century, engraved with an arabesque motif, and just long enough for his Marlboros. It’d been heavily tarnished, the first time Theo had seen it. He’d used one of the two pots in Boris’ kitchen to boil a polish mixture for it, and the smell of it had filled the air, biting and metallic, like the taste of hydrogen peroxide.  
  
(“Looks like you’re making bad drugs,” Boris had said, as Theo lined a bowl with tinfoil and poured the mixture in, but he’d gone silent after that. Theo had glanced at him once, as he dried the case off with a soft cloth, careful to get the crevices, and seen something in the set of his mouth - something -)  
  
He pulls himself away from that, too, and stands up from the sofa, restless.  
  
“You’re leaving?” Boris asks, disagreement seemingly forgotten, not bothering to hide his unhappiness.   
  
“No,” Theo says, although he’d been considering it. It’s difficult to be friends with Boris sometimes, here, in these tiny rooms. The air is thick with Marlboros and Ivan’s Belomorkanals, and underlying it all, sex, no matter how long Boris keeps the windows open. If he leaves, he’ll have to pay to get back in. The constraints of it all make him uncomfortable, the way that even the most casual conversation has become loaded with transaction.  
  
“You want…” Boris offers, eyes darting down, and Theo drops back onto the sofa.  
  
“No,” he says again, more sharply than he means to.  
  
Boris stubs his cigarette out and lights another.  
  
—  
  
Sometimes Theo looks at Boris and feels the same boundless, groundless possessiveness right under his skin that he’d felt when Pippa had visited with a new boyfriend. The same thing he’d felt when Boris had left him for Kotku, a feeling he can put a name to now, after all those years: jealousy.  
  
They haven’t fucked, despite Boris’ offers. Theo doesn’t want it. He might want it too much. He worries that Boris wouldn’t want it. He worries that if he touches Boris, if he so much as brushes a fingertip against him, that Ivan will have to force him out of the apartment by gunpoint when his time is up. It’s simpler to leave things as they are, the memory of Boris’ skin pressing against his in the vast expanse of desert heat.  
  
  
_pre._   
  
The thing he’d never thought about, in all the hours he’s spent worrying about ways his life could collapse, is how difficult it’d be to organize a funeral in the middle of a pandemic. It’s not like the movies, or what Theo assumes the movies must be like - not total societal collapse. Just more death, more panic, more greed. All the soldiers in the streets couldn’t prevent the neat bullet hole in Hobie’s chest, almost impossible to see against his dark cardigan.  
  
Theo had thought he was sleeping, for one impossible moment. Surrounded by blood, in the middle of the shop. Impossible, and yet, for a moment, he’d thought it. That disoriented, unthinking faith that his mother would be in their apartment, rearing its idiot head again.   
  
—  
  
He’d had to close Hobie’s eyes.  
  
—  
  
The building is a tall, brick, pre-war monstrosity, the kind of place that’s expensive because it’s Manhattan and a stone’s throw from the Hudson River, not because of any particular qualities of its own. Theo had expected something more or something less, but it’s thoroughly unremarkable. The doorman is wearing a holster with a pistol in it, and he tells Theo to take the stairs instead of the elevator - another power outage, also unremarkable.  
  
There’s a short but muscular man standing outside the door Theo had been directed to - 4C. He looks at the card Evgeny had given Theo for a long minute, then raps on the door, four short, one long. He settles against the wall and pulls a slim book out of his jacket pocket, and Theo resigns himself to waiting.  
  
Maybe fifteen minutes pass, during which Theo spots seven dead flies in the hall light above his head and tries to tilt his head to see what the man is reading, to no avail. He hears movement right before the door opens, and realizes, in that moment, that he is absolutely unprepared for whoever is behind the door. If isn’t Boris, then it’s a Ukrainian rentboy fully expecting Theo to have sex with him.   
  
If it is Boris -   
  
The door opens, and a tall, balding man steps out. He looks right at Theo and winks at him, then saunters down the hall. Behind him, standing in the doorway, is Boris.  
  
His feet are bare, Theo notes. The man guarding the door crosses his arms, and Theo sees the inside of his book. Poetry, Frank O’Hara. _I bloomed on the back of a frightened black mare._  
  
Boris, standing in the doorway, eyes wide.  
  
“Potter?” he says, and it’s _his_ voice, just a little lower than the last time Theo had heard it.   
  
“Problem?” the man asks, and Boris shakes his head, but his eyes stay on Theo.  
  
Too late to run. Theo takes a step forward, then another, and then Boris is reaching out over the threshold and pulling him in with a hand against the back of his neck.   
  
“You’re shorter,” Theo says dumbly, his head practically resting on top of Boris’ dark, unruly hair.  
  
He hears Boris laugh, strange and muffled against his chest, and then he pulls away, hand still pressed against Theo’s neck.  
  
“My god, and to think I missed you,” Boris says, smiling, and Theo feels a grin break across his face for the first time in months.   
  
“You’ve got an hour,” the man outside the door says, and the moment vanishes like a soap bubble. The smile on Boris’ face goes thin and crooked, but he pulls Theo further inside and shut the door.

Theo steps out of his grasp, the definitive sound of the door shutting jumpstarting his awareness of the situation. He feels overwhelmed, noticing everything and unable to focus on anything. The apartment is small and poorly furnished. Boris is wearing a dark red sweater with a hole in the shoulder.  
  


"I have tea," Boris offers, and Theo nods, pulling on the first pleasant expression he can find. A customer service face.  
  
“That’d be great,” he says, and Boris laughs, abrupt and inexplicable.  
  
The silence that sets in is vast, and Theo finds himself frozen in it, looking on as Boris lights the stove burner with a match. The air smells like cigarette smoke and callery pears.   
  
The sound of the kettle shrieking is a relief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cigarette case looks like [this](https://p1.liveauctioneers.com/1221/133456/68260800_1_x.jpg?auto=webp&format=pjpg&version=1&width=512).
> 
> I'm imagining that Boris' apartment is in a building on West 84th street.
> 
> The poem Theo sees is Frank O'Hara's "Poem" from _Meditations in an Emergency_ \- a few other pertinent lines:
> 
> _and she'd toss her head with the pain_  
and paw the air and champ the bit, as if I were Endymion  
and she, moon-like, hated to love me. 
> 
> _All things are tragic  
when a mother watches!_


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like Theo, I was badly sidetracked by Boris in this chapter and didn't manage to get back to the plot. Next chapter, I guess...

_mid._  
  
The main branch of the New York Public Library is open three days a week, from 10 am to 4 pm, and Theo walks three miles from Boris’ apartment to it on a grey Wednesday afternoon. He’d only seen Boris for thirty minutes, on his way back from an early morning appraisal in Mott Haven. He hadn’t been planning on it, hadn’t even had any cash on him. He’d had to pay with one of the pieces he’d been given by the elderly woman whose jewelry he’d looked at. Ivan had turned the ring over in his fingers, running a fingernail over the carnelians set in the gold as though he could tell its worth with a scratch.  
  
“30 minutes,” he’d said, and Theo wasn’t sure if he was being overcharged or the ring was being undervalued, but he didn’t care, not really, not with Boris just on the other side of a door.  
  
(In hindsight, Ivan had clearly known that, was betting on him not willing to haggle. Theo wonders what Ivan thinks they do behind that door. Is there anything about Theo that sets him apart? Is there anything about Boris that sets Theo apart? Does Ivan just keep an ear out for any particularly suspicious noise and forget about the rest of it, caught up in his poetry?)  
  
—  
  
Boris is high. He stumbles from the door back to the couch without saying a word to Theo, and topples onto it. Blinks up at him slowly, face flushed, the top three buttons of his shirt undone. Theo sits next to him with no small amount of discomfort.  
  
“Mikael came by earlier,” Theo guesses, because that’s who gives Boris his heroin.  
  
“Mm, close,” Boris says, “Greg. American guy, Mikael’s brother-in-law.”  
  
Boris settles further into the couch cushions, leaning away from Theo until his head is at the other end, and he can swing his legs up onto Theo’s. They’re a slight weight, his bony ankles and fine-haired calves, worryingly so. His hair has gotten almost as long as it was when Theo first met him, and it obscures his face, but Theo knows his cheekbones have grown more prominent, the circles under his eyes darker. He’s losing weight, he’s high, and Mikael hadn’t even bothered to show up himself this morning. Theo is coming to conclusions that he doesn’t like.  
  
“He likes to watch,” Boris mumbles against the couch. His toes curl and uncurl, and Theo watches his metatarsals shift in lieu of looking at the slack muscles of his face. Boris on heroin scares some adolescent part of him that wants them to be in the same space all the time. It scares the adult part of him that had begun to put out feelers for someone who could get him naloxone. Jeremy could’ve maybe, if he was still in the city, but he’d disappeared and Theo had never managed to find a replacement. Instead, he’d tapered down his Oxy use after Hobie’s death, something that more or less stuck when he didn’t know anyone who could get him more.  
  
“Voyeuristic motherfucker,” Boris says, pulling Theo out of his thoughts. The syllables in the first word are mangled almost beyond recognition, but Theo is fluent in the way Boris speaks in any condition. He shifts on the couch again, his fundamental restlessness poking through the daze, and Theo puts a hand on his ankle without thinking. Hand against bare skin, fine dark hair under his palm. The way it puts him at ease makes him want to move away. The way Boris relaxes under his touch makes him stay.  
  
Boris drifts in and out, and Theo endeavors to be still and steady for him. Really, he just watches. _Voyeuristic motherfucker._ The knock on the door breaks up the hazy daydream he’d fallen into, running a thumb across Boris’ skin and remembering a rare night in Vegas where they’d been awake past moonrise, specifically to watch a meteor shower.  
  
(“You never see meteors before?” Boris had asked incredulously, a patchwork child of all the loneliest places in the world, and Theo had shoved him, said, “Not everywhere can be Karmey-fucking-wallag,” and later after the scuffle they’d taken half the beer in Boris’ fridge outside and waited for nightfall.)  
  
Boris doesn’t rouse at the knock, and Theo has to lift his legs and slide out from under them.  
  
“Lazy,” he mutters, but the numbed nerves of Boris’ body give the word nowhere to land.  
  
—  
  
“It feels fucking incredible when it happens,” Boris tells him, once. “Then later…”  
  
Theo doesn’t ask him to explain. He knows about aftermaths.  
  
  
  
  
_pre._  
  
Somewhere in the middle of the epidemic, after it becomes clear that there is an epidemic, but before things break down so badly that some semblance of order can be reformed from the pieces, the internet goes down.  
  
Theo is almost as unbothered by this as Hobie; the phone lines going down had been a far bigger problem. Two weeks into the blackout, however, Hobie makes him take the train to the library, which miraculously has unreliable internet access, so he can send Pippa an email and make sure she’s alright.  
  
“Tell her not to come here, no matter what,” Hobie instructs him. “She’s much safer in London.”  
  
She is safer; as far as anyone knows, the outbreaks have been confined to North America and heavily quarantined international airports. Theo doubts it’ll stay that way, he checks the news as often as he can with a morbid curiosity, keeps a list of every state and country with a recorded case in a leatherbound journal Pippa had gotten him three Christmases ago. (It was the sort of mildly expensive, impersonal gift that should’ve dissuaded him from reading into it, not that that stopped him.)  
  
He does tell her not to worry about them, and spends ten of his thirty reserved minutes at the computer typing and deleting “Don’t try to fly over here, no matter what,” before sending the email with the sentence half-gone. _Don’t try to_ it says, and then, like an absurd joke, two lines down, _Love, Theo_.  
  
—  
  
“Potter, you can’t be for real,” Boris says incredulously, “You have never seen meteor shower before?”  
  
“Not all of us lived in Karmey-fucking-wallag,” Theo says, shoving Boris away when he intentionally collides against him, sending Boris spinning into the door of one of the refrigerators in the microwave dinner aisle of the Costco.  
  
“American cities, so polluted,” Boris laments, pressing his cheek against the glass. “Can’t even see the sky.”  
  
“All cities are polluted, you ass!”  
  
In the ensuing chaos, Theo slips two frozen burritos into the pockets of his jacket. He makes Boris wait the full 68 minutes that the package says they have to cook, passing a bottle of vodka back and forth and feeding chips to Popchik.  
  
“No more vodka!” Boris announces, utterly uncharacteristically, when the oven timer goes off. Theo grabs for the bottle because he can, and Boris grabs it back and holds it just out of reach, exploiting the inches he has on Theo.  
  
“Fucker,” Theo breathes out, and he turns back towards the stove like he’s going to pulls the burritos out, then whirls around and reaches for the vodka again, fingers brushing against the bottom.  
  
“No vodka!” Boris says again, “You will blackout and miss the meteors, Potter. We go to my house, drink beers, eat. Then watch the stars when it gets dark.”  
  
Only the fact that he’s close to drunk keeps Theo from blurting the first words that come to mind, from taking a hatchet to what Boris is offering him. It’s almost a relief, in a way, to be the one who - who doesn’t want the right things. And he knows, in his gut, that laying out under the dark sky with Boris, watching for falling stars, would be a wrong thing. He knows it, somehow.  
  
But the vodka is making him braver, warmer, slower, more cowardly, so he doesn’t say anything and lets Boris keep the bottle, and almost burns his fingers trying to pull the burritos out with bare hands.

—  
  
The stars are like nothing he’s ever seen before, hundreds of them streaking across the sky for hours. The temperature drops precipitously, the bone-deep chill of the desert at night, and Boris presses his body against Theo’s like he has nothing to fear. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe every star will fall out of the sky, and the world will end with Boris’ head against his shoulder, and they will have all the time and dark in the world for Boris to teach him how to never be afraid again. Maybe, in that endless future, there will be no more reason to fear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ And I won't be afraid of anything ever again.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YahiDX_mbWA)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short little chapter to move things along. I think there'll probably be two or three more.

_mid._  
  
The city is quieter. That might be the biggest change, aside from the martial law and the rubble of buildings that had burned down with no fire department to stop them, and the blackouts, and the fact that Theo has lost Hobie again, permanently this time, and found Boris again, precariously. He’s seen crowds with rictus faces, the fear of being in a public place and thus being a potential target - the distrust and the guns are manifestations of old habits. But nothing can cover up the fact that the city has fewer people and many, many more graves.   
  
This fact loses some of its intrinsic alarm when Theo is in places where quiet has always been sacrosanct, like the library. Or so he imagines - he must’ve gone there at some point Before, but he can’t quite remember. As it is, he settles in at one of the public computers and for once the hush and muffle of the air feels natural, if not welcome.   
  
He finds what he’s looking for almost instantly. **Clinical Guidelines for Withdrawal Management and Treatment of Drug Dependence in Closed Settings**, the NCBI website page says, and he scrolls down to the chapter on opioid withdrawal management. Clonidine, buprenorphine, codeine phosphate - the question is which will work best for Boris, which he should track down and commit to heart the dosage regimens, the indications and contraindications for adjustments and symptomatic medications.   
  
It’s something a doctor could determine, if he could get Boris to one, but the plan forming in his mind revolves around the fact that he and Boris will have to stay as far off the radar as possible before leaving the city - and they will have to leave. If Boris could've gotten out easily or without consequence, he would’ve. Theo is sure of that.   
  
—  
  
And Boris does need to leave, he’s equally sure of that. It’s not just the heroin, which Theo is beginning to suspect, from the vague allusions Boris makes to the time he’d spent in Vegas after Theo left, was a problem before Mikael. It’s the confinement, the way Boris watches him leave sometimes with a sharp longing - for the world in the hallway, on the sidewalk, out in the city.

(And it’s the bruises, the way Boris’ clothes hang off of him, the way he’s been reduced and reduced to a vulnerable essence with no one left to protect it but Theo and Boris himself.  
  
And it’s the way Boris pretends not to care about any of it).   
  
  
  
_pre._  
  
He gets back from Vegas with Xandra’s pills in his bag and things progress and deteriorate in equal measure. Hobie never says anything - possibly never knows, although Theo finds this difficult to believe, in hindsight. Pippa does say something, the only other person Theo cares about who has some continuity for his character, and thus the only other person who has a chance of calling him out.  
  
It’s Christmas, a little more than two years after Theo had arrived back on Hobie’s doorstep feverish, bruised, and miserable. She corners him in the hallway right outside their rooms on Christmas Eve, gaze bright and knowing, hair flaming red. A recent escapee of the Switzerland school via graduation, and an even more recent combatant against Hobie’s gentle inquiries as to what her plans are. The last two years have sharpened her ability to ask difficult questions, while the last two years - the accelerated high school program, the college classes - have dulled Theo’s reflexes entirely.  
  
He’s complacent, used to his bubble of invisibility and Hobie’s loving neglect, and so when she turns to him in the hallway and interrupts the question lurking in his throat, half-formed (_Will you, would you, I mean, do you think that you’d like_), he has no defenses.  
  
“You know Hobie cares about you very much,” she says bluntly, “I don’t think he’d be happy that you’re doing drugs.”  
  
“I - what?” he says, off-guard and maybe a little tipsy from the wine they’d had with dinner.  
  
“The pills,” she says, looking close to rolling her eyes.  
  
“I’ve got it under control,” he says, after a long, long moment. The light in the hall is very dim, but he can see her skeptical expression clearly through the gloom.  
  
She lets it lie, though, because she’s leaving, and what alternative does she really have, besides telling Hobie, which she’d never do because they’re teenagers, and because, Theo thinks, there’s a sense of hopelessness about Theo himself that speaks to the inevitable inefficacy of any attempts to help.  
  
“Don’t be stupid,” she tells him, the morning that she leaves, and he smiles, happy for her attention in the daylight. She lets him kiss her cheek, and he carries the feeling with him for days, marveling over it up in his room as he collapses backwards onto his bed and into the slightly warmer embrace of a carefully crushed roxy, less carefully inhaled through a straw.  
  
The air outside is very, very cold. He can make out snowflakes drifting in and out of the spread of the streetlight outside the window, and he drifts with them. He hasn’t been that close to anyone since Boris and that had been - different. Of course it had.  
  
(She'd smelled faintly of almonds, and her skin had been soft and warm.)

He’s in love with her.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hm. Listened to the new Nick Cave album and this happened. May seriously edit or delete in the morning, depending.
> 
> ETA: Went with the serious editing! Added a pre. bit, and fleshed out the mid. as well.
> 
> Regardless, we'll be moving into the post. next chapter.
> 
> Warnings for the aftermath of a suicide attempt, vomit, and references to Theo's relationship with Julie from the book (she was 27, he was 16).

_mid._  
  
The air has been thick all afternoon with cigarette smoke and the crackling unease of a summer storm when Theo finds himself asking the question.  
  
“No,” Boris says with barely a moment’s thought, blowing out a stream of smoke between bitten-red lips, “I was never in love after you left.”  
  
“What about that girl, K-something,” Theo says, feigning casualness. Fishing for something, although he’s not sure what.  
  
“Her name was Kotku, you know this,” Boris frowns, “And that was before.”  
  
“Well, I remember _that_,” Theo says sourly, and Boris just shakes his head, exhaustion stamped across his features, and exhales more smoke.  
  
—  
  
The difficult part isn’t getting the drugs for Boris, or figuring out the dosages and memorizing lists of symptoms, or even visiting Hobart and Blackwell’s for what will likely be the last time. The air inside smells like must and rust, and Theo sticks to the sides of the shoproom, avoiding the stain in the middle of the floor, but that's not the truly difficult part. No, the difficult part is the waiting.  
  
He’s not sure what he’s waiting for. He hasn’t told Boris yet, which is a serious obstacle - perhaps the greatest left, aside from the actual leaving.  
  
The air gets colder. The apartment stays the same. He sees Boris in every state, and none seem safe to broach the topic during. He considers, once, briefly, that old sit-com trick. The post-coital conversation. He discards the thought immediately. It reappears in his dreams, as everything he feels guilt over is wont to do. Some nights he wakes up, throat raw, utterly alone, aware down to the minute how long it’s been since he’s shared a bed with anyone he could trust. With anyone. His skin aches with the knowledge. In the afternoons, he pays in rings and bracelets to spend an hour or two arguing and remembering and watching the sky with Boris. The tea is always oversteeped. The bruises come and go.  
—  
  
“You never liked her,” Boris says, after a long moment. “I didn’t understand why, not then.”  
  
Theo stays silent, jaw tight at the implication that Boris understands _now_.  
  
“Jealous,” Boris accuses, smirking. Unruly curls, sun-starved skin, a sweater slipping off bony shoulders.  
  
The word is a flashpoint for defensiveness, but Theo finds himself curiously empty, cool powder. Is there really a point to denial? It had taken him so long to be able to name even a part of it himself, and he still struggles with identifying the rest of it. Refuses to, maybe. But it’s hard to convince himself that any of it really matters, in this shattered world. Theo’s always felt a multitude of eyes on him, but he carries a gun now.  
  
“Yes,” he admits, giving in expressionlessly, and Boris’ face goes soft with surprise.  
  
_Ha_, Theo thinks. _Weren’t expecting that one. _  
  
But Boris has always given as good as he gets.  
  
“So why don’t we fuck, Potter,” he says, tone light and eyes dark and challenging. “You wanted me. You want me. I see how you look at me. How much money you pay to do nothing, _nothing_ -“  
  
His voice is rising, and he’s standing up straight, cigarette forgotten, ash suffocating the glowing tip, and Theo - Theo -  
  
snaps, “Fuck you, Boris, you fucking idiot. I don't want anything. You’re my friend.”  
  
“Sure,” Boris sneers, and Theo’s seeing it all now, every year they’d lived through apart, the scar tissue suddenly visible where it overlays Boris’ translucent skin, poison thrumming in his veins. “Everyone wants something.”  
  
“You’re my friend,” Theo says again, and he’s horrified to find that he’s almost in tears. “That's all." But it isn't, it isn't, and somehow he finds himself saying the rest.

"I love you.”  
  
The admission takes the wind out of Boris’ sails. His mouth hangs open. Ash falls from his cigarette on the floor. It’ll scar the wood, Theo thinks, particles leaving a mark in their ravenous dying moments. But it’s an easy fix, getting out cigarette burns out of hardwood. Hobie had shown him how, years ago, before the world had ended.  
  
Theo blinks once, twice, lashes wet, and thinks about the sharp smell of acetone and Hobie’s gentle directions.  
  
“You deserve more than this, Boris,” he says. “And I -“  
  
“I don’t deserve anything,” Boris tells him bitterly. “Theo, all I have done is hurt you. But you’re lonely, no Hobie, no girl, no mother, so you take it.”  
  
“I love you,” Theo says again, because he can’t deny that Boris has hurt him, of course he has, but does it matter? (The words feel weaker this time, a sigh, not a statement. Does it matter?)  
  
“Yes,” Boris shrugs, matter-of-fact. “And I love you, of course. But what good has ever come from that?”  
  
Theo gapes at the question, but the answer rises up out of his heart and into his throat immediately. _Everything. You're the only good thing I’ve had in so long. You found me alone in the desert and you held me. You taught me how to survive, you shared everything with me. You were _there_ with me._  
  
But he can’t force them out. Or maybe he can, maybe he deliberately holds them back. It’s easy, he has years of long practice in keeping his mouth from voicing sentiments that are undeniable in their queerness. He carries a gun now, but so does Ivan, lurking right on the other side of the door.

He can feel the soft edges of the words cluttering his mouth. But he can’t speak them.  
  
Boris watches him, some strange, painful smile flitting around his mouth as Theo stays silent. Eventually Boris merely shrugs as if to say, _as I thought_.  
  
And Theo, practiced coward that he is, leaves.

_pre._  
  
Theo knows absent guardians intimately, and so he knows that Hobie isn’t absent in his care, not really. Absent doesn't explain the ways that Hobie looks after him, asking him about his classes, making breakfast in the mornings, teaching him everything he knows with no reserve. Hobie lets him stay in bed on the worst days and brings him a cup of tea and a battered Tolkien paperback with a look of understanding that’s miles and miles away from Larry and Xandra and Boris’ dad, all of whom never understood anything whatsoever.  
  
No, Hobie understands, and as a result of that understanding he lets Theo alone. He doesn’t push, doesn’t ask uncomfortable questions. Just gives Theo his own space, and lets him fumble around, figuring things out like he’s a normal, idiot teenager.  
  
Theo appreciates this way of doing things quite a lot at first, and somewhat less so later. He decides early on that Hobie probably notices quite a bit of it, the alcohol, the pills, the occasional smoke out of Welty’s window, but just decides to leave well enough alone. And so when Theo begins seeing Julie, he assumes Hobie can see it on him. The first time he comes home with the knowledge that he’s fucked someone laying in his skin, ahead of the curve at sixteen, although Boris had been younger, and he feels like the whole world must be able to tell simply by the way he walks home from her studio apartment. But Hobie especially, with his curious smile and his warmth at seeing Theo happy, or less unhappy, at any rate, Hobie must be able to tell.  
  
(Hobie must be able to tell, he thinks, as the months go on and Julie’s invitations grow more sporadic, and the way her arm brushes against his in the aftermath makes him feel nauseous and empty all at once. Hobie must be able to tell, so why wouldn’t he ask if anything is wrong? _Is_ anything wrong?)  
  
—

Sometimes he dreams about Boris. The dreams aren’t like the ones he has about his mother, a fundamental conflict between a knowing head and a grieving heart. No, with Boris it’s the opposite. _I will never see him again_, he tells himself, and then night comes and proves him a liar. He dreams about Boris on the barren playground of the subdivision, too tall for the swings, feet dragging on the ground. In his dreams, he’ll walk over to the swingset, and Boris will look up at him with a lazy grin and say _You’re late, Potter_ and _I’ve been waiting for you_ and Theo knows what he really means is_ I missed you, even though we were only apart a few hours. We woke up holding each other and we’ll go to sleep in the same bed, and still, I missed you._

When he dreams about his mother, he wakes up gasping, screaming, lungs working doubletime to turn the hazy air of the museum into usable oxygen. He has to bring himself out of it - pills, breathing exercises, petting Popchyk until the world around him feels more real than the one in his head. Sometimes when he dreams about Boris, he wakes up smiling. Same routine.

—

Several mornings he wakes up unexpectedly, mouth and cheek crusted in his own vomit, an empty bottle of pills and a half-empty bottle of vodka sitting on the bathroom counter. The tile of the floor is freezing.  
  
He watches Hobie despairingly at breakfast, nineteen years old but feeling all of sixteen again, the same questions spinning stupidly in his head. _Doesn’t he know? Why doesn’t he ask? _  
  
Absent isn’t the right word.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you read the last chapter at any time before last night, you might want to give it a re-read - I've been editing bits for the last week.
> 
> Also, if you're wondering what this is all about, exactly, I gave some ['director's commentary'](https://leguin.tumblr.com/post/188204007041/im-not-creative-enough-to-think-of-a-specific) about it on tumblr.

_post._  
  
The gunshot is still ringing in his ears when Boris collapses on Theo’s sofa, chest heaving, blood dripping from his fingertips onto the upholstery. The part of Theo’s mind trained to note flaws and how to restore them is stuck on that detail, the blood blooming in little florets on the cream-colored velvet. The rest of his mind is with his body, striding into the bathroom to grab the first-aid kit on the shelf over the toilet. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror: stiff shoulders, blood spattered on his shirt, his coat, the edge of his jaw. _Spray_, his mind supplies, _arterial spray_, but that’s not really true; he hadn’t hit an artery.  
  
(It’d been lifeblood all the same. A life on his jacket. Another one bleeding out in the living room. An exchange, if he can just move quickly enough.)  
  
—  
  
“We can’t stay here,” Boris pants, head lying against the arm of the sofa. “You paid so many times to see me, Mikael has information on you for sure.”  
  
“I know,” Theo says, dropping more bloody gauze on the floor. “I have a car ready.”  
  
“You’ve been planning this,” Boris says, and it’s hard to tell through the thick layer of pain whether there’s approval in his voice or not. His mouth is strangely slack, the only signs of it in the pinched lines around his eyes.   
  
“I just need to tape this up,” Theo says, and Boris snorts at his avoidance, but doesn’t say anything.  
  
For a moment there’s only Boris’ heavy breathing breaking the dead silence of the world, until it’s joined by the sound of Theo cutting the gauze roll with a pair of nail scissors. On some level, however, Theo knows this is the noisiest the apartment has been since he claimed it as his own, two bodies occupying it for the first time in months. Boris existing in it, alive, is changing his perception of the place entirely. All the strange empty corners have fallen away; only the man lying on a sofa he’d dragged up three flights of stairs from a furniture store next door is truly real. Simultaneously, Theo is now keenly aware of all the idiosyncrasies of the previous occupants on the cluttered bookshelves, the walls, the kitchen counters. He’d changed so little, not even the photos of some long-gone family taken down.   
  
The grin of a middle-aged couple standing on a mountain peak accosts him as he turns to gather up and dispose of the bloody bandages, and Theo realizes with a start that if he hadn’t found Boris, he would’ve killed himself. Not here, maybe not even immediately, but eventually. He’d never even tried to make this a home. Home was people buried in the sandy loam of a Brooklyn cemetery. A shop that would never open again. A boy who’d grown up into a stranger.  
  
He takes the bandages into the kitchen, and Boris’ voice follows him in.  
  
“I’d say sorry for bleeding on your couch, but it’s fucking ugly,” Boris calls from the living room, as Theo washes his hands methodically in the kitchen sink. He presses them to his face, remembers the drying blood too late. Has to wash them again, and clean his face with a damp dishrag. There’s a giant jar of novelty cookie cutters on the counter next to the stove.   
  
“It doesn’t matter,” he murmurs, more to himself than Boris. “It’s not mine.”  
  
  
  
_mid._  
  
He stays away for three days. The funny thing is that he’s gone longer in-between visits, but the intentionality of it - the way it feels like discipline, like punishment, although for which of them Theo isn’t sure - makes the time weigh more heavily on him.  
  
Three days, and they feel like a lifetime. The first day, he goes to another job out in the Bronx which takes up nowhere near enough time. Walks around his own neighborhood until he grows too paranoid, then gets drunk in the living room of his apartment and thinks about getting high until even his teeth feel itchy with need. He drinks some more, and thinks about Boris, alone in his apartment - or even worse, not alone.   
  
—  
  
They’d never really fought in Vegas. Or rather they had, they’d fought constantly, Boris’ mood swings and outbreaks of violence leading Theo into similar patterns, but those fights had been like geyser activity, temporary and largely harmless. Even after Kotku had attached herself to Boris, they hadn’t had any prolonged fights, no separations borne out of anger. Theo had seethed and pined all over Vegas, alone, but that’d had a different quality to it. He’d been waiting for Boris to come back, then. He’s not waiting anymore. Not really.  
  
—  
  
In hindsight, there’d been an inevitability to the fight. All the things they hadn’t talked about, all the ways they’d changed that they couldn’t acknowledge. Maybe it’s a good thing, Theo thinks on the second day, that they’d started to have that conversation now. He imagines Boris watching him with dark eyes, sitting in the passenger seat of the car, watching the miles pass by and waiting for Theo to exact some payment from him. The thought skulks into his dreams that night, muddled memory and nightmare and desire mixing together. He wakes up hard and covered in a cold sweat.  
  
—  
  
But had they solved anything at all, he wonders on the third morning. What Boris had said, what he’d hinted at - it’s a problem too big for a single conversation, or maybe for any conversation. Boris needs something Theo couldn’t give him then, and has come no closer to being able to give now. Proof of some fundamental goodness of humanity.   
  
Theo had never really believed in that, and he believes in it even less after the bombing, after Vegas, after Hobie’s death. After his dream. His hands tangled in Boris’ hair. Pulling. Boris, looking up at him through his lashes. An emergency broadcast on the car radio. The feeling of Boris swallowing around him.  
  
In the dream, these are all good things.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for several mentions of vomiting and some really implausible drive times (i've mapped it out, just believe that they're going very slowly).
> 
> The "fool me once" verses are from the Mountain Goats song "Acceptable Damages Sutra."
> 
> closer to the end, now...i've said it a few times already, but i think there really are just two chapters left.

_post._  
  
Maybe twelve hours out of the city, Theo takes an exit off of Interstate 81 and pulls over in the parking lot of a burned out diner so he can re-bandage Boris’ arm. Boris had been right about one thing - it was just a graze, a bloody mark on his right bicep, clotted but weeping clear plasma. Theo cleans it with isopropyl wipes, packs it with clean gauze, and wraps it up again with tape and more gauze. They’re running low on bandages already - his first aid kit hadn’t been made anticipating gunshot wounds. More fool him.  
  
Boris is largely silent through the bandaging, watching Theo through greasy curls with an unnervingly bright gaze. Withdrawal beginning to crawl over him, half a day out from Mikael, from Greg. He takes shallow breaths as Theo runs his fingers along the tape to make sure it’s secure, and shivers when Theo steps away.  
  
“Good?” he asks, and Theo nods, avoiding his eyes. There’s something unsettling about their spotlight focus paired with what feels, to Theo, like a lack of real perception. He wonders what Boris is aware of right now beyond the nausea twisting his gut and the sparking synapses of craving. Does he know where they are? It hardly seems to matter.  
  
It’s late afternoon, an hour that speaks more to the madness of the morning than the passage of the rest of the day. Only twelve hours since they left behind Theo’s apartment. Maybe fourteen since Boris escaped his own.  
  
Boris lets out a rusty ‘hah!’ as they pull back onto the highway, the noise sending a jolt through Theo.  
  
“You see the sign by the road? Welcome to Christiansburg, it said. Didn’t help them very much, I think, that name,” Boris says, sounding more himself than he has the whole drive.  
  
“Christ,” he adds after a moment, head turning gingerly towards Theo when he gets no response.  
  
“I got it,” Theo says.  
  
“You got it, but you don’t say anything? What happened to friendship, Potter?” Boris asks. “It’s like being driven by a corpse.”  
  
“I’m tired,” Theo says shortly, which is true. He’s slept maybe five hours out of the last thirty-six, pulled over twice for brief naps since they left, but nothing substantial. He’s afraid to close his eyes for more than a minute, terrified that Boris will be gone when he wakes up, or, even more implausibly, dead in the passenger’s seat. He’d jerked awake after just a few minutes both times he’d stopped to rest, gunshots ringing in his head and Boris falling backwards, eyes wide, twisting to avoid pain that was already a part of him.  
  
“I’d offer to drive, but I think I’d be even worse than you, the way I’m feeling,” Boris says, which is a welcome change from his insistence a few hours ago that he was good to drive, Potter, why not let him take the wheel before Theo fell asleep and drove off the road and killed them both. Then he’d thrown up in his own lap in the middle of a sentence, which had put a stop to that. The car smells like vomit now, but Theo considers it a worthwhile trade. (And a relief, the displacement of blood and stale sweat that had permeated the car, reminding him of the shop).  
  
Theo can see the back of the sign in the rearview mirror as he gets on the highway. The town’s name has been crossed out; in the drag of his eyes from the mirror back to the road, he catches a glimpse of Boris’ exhausted face and the words still remaining: “Now Leaving !”  
  
—  
  
They seem to move more slowly, the farther they get from New York. Boris’ withdrawal is going more smoothly than Theo could’ve hoped, but they have to stop regularly so he can tumble out of the passenger seat to fall on his hands and knees in some abandoned parking lot and retch, shivering in the autumn air. When the clonidine finally kicks in and the nausea begins to fade, he curls up under a blanket in the backseat and falls into a restless, twitching sleep.  
  
The roads are nearly empty and only get emptier as they head southwest, and then just west entirely. Time begins to slip out of place, or perhaps it’s only Theo slipping out of time. Hands on the wheel, 10 and 2. Fingers on Boris’ neck, checking his heart rate. The notes he’d taken are emblazoned on the inside of his eyelids: pulse more than 50, give 75 micrograms of clonidine. Shake a pill out of the bottle. Push a hand into Boris’ hair, tilt the water bottle against his mouth. It’s not really touching if it’s out of necessity, is it?  
  
He turns on the radio somewhere around Nashville, still on the 81, the relative silence in the car pushing his tinnitus to a critical point. The only thing that comes through even remotely clearly is some obviously unlicensed broadcaster on an FM band, playing what sounds like the same nasally, wailing musician all the way through the state. He keeps it low, bites his lip to try and stay awake, and checks his mirrors with religious dedication. Every third look in the rearview, he lets his eyes rest on Boris. No more than two seconds at a time, until some obvious breath or movement sets Theo’s mind back on its tracks. Then back to the road again.   
  
_But some habits are hard to break, hard to break_  
_And some aren't really habits anymore_  
_Fool me once, you know, _  
_shame, shame…_  
  
  
  
_mid._  
  
“So,” Theo starts, and Boris’ mouth thins immediately.  
  
They’re in his apartment. The initial tense standoff in the hall, Boris watching Theo from the doorway with tired, wary eyes, had been resolved by Ivan cuffing Boris round the head like an unruly child.  
  
“He paid!” Ivan said, and Boris had grimaced and turned on his heel, retreating back into the apartment with a sort of reluctant grace.  
  
Theo had followed him in, closing the door on Ivan’s muttering, and now there they were, three days apart and separated by a distance as vast and hospitable as the Mojave Desert.  
  
“I-“ Theo starts again, pausing when he realizes he has nowhere to go. He didn’t come here to apologize. He didn’t even really come here to make peace.  
  
Why did he come here? Why has he been coming here at all? _Everyone wants something_, Boris had said, and the words have stuck thick in the air. He can see them in the way Boris leans against the windowsill, no part of him at ease. It’s nothing like Boris had been when they were younger, not when they were alone. It unsettles him.  
  
“You need to leave,” Theo says, finally.  
  
“Seems like that should be my line, Potter,” Boris says. The perennial dark circles around his eyes have taken on a new cast since Theo last saw them, something threateningly skeletal in them. The potential for disaster.  
  
Theo ignores him. He glances around the room, less out of paranoia than for somewhere else to look. Boris’ mouth is bringing flashes of his dream to the surface. The potential for disaster all around them.   
  
“I have a plan. Just tell me you’ll actually come with me this time, and it can happen.”  
  
He looks back at Boris when he finally says it, because - because he needs to know. Boris doesn’t say anything for a moment, just watches him, evaluating. He works his jaw, swallows, then taps a finger on the windowsill.  
  
“This plan of yours - actual plan? Or plan like when we were younger? Running away from home with a head full of bad ideas?”  
  
“I made it here, didn’t I?” Theo snaps, although he grows less sure every day that he had. He’d left something behind when he got on the Greyhound. Some stolen part of him that looked at Boris and saw the desert behind him.  
  
Boris is still tapping his finger, jittery and arrhythmic. He’s wearing a red sweater with a hole at the collar, thick strands of yarn curling against his skin. He’d had a sweater like that in Vegas, or maybe it was the same one, Theo could well imagine him carting his stolen, well-loved, ill-treated clothing across the country.  
  
He’s expecting a yes, or a no, or an argument. But he doesn’t get one.  
  
“You love me,” Boris says, apropos of nothing.  
  
“Boris…”  
  
“What? You said it yourself. However you want to define it is your business. But you said it yourself.”  
  
“Yes,” Theo admits, because he had said it. He regretted it. He wanted to regret it. “I meant it.”  
  
He considers asking Boris if he’d meant what he’d said - any of it, all of it. But it’s unnecessary on multiple counts. Boris doesn’t need to love him to come with him. But he does love him, Theo thinks. He feels more certain of that than anything else. (_And what good has ever come of that?_)  
  
Boris just hums neutrally at Theo’s words, but he shifts, standing upright, and he seems a little more at ease as he goes over to the stove and lights the burner that the kettle is sitting on.  
  
“Okay, Potter. Tea, and you tell me your plan.”  
  
And then he smiles at Theo, not an open-mouthed grin of their youth, but a small, curling thing.  
  
Theo tries to return it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two days after he buries Hobie, Theo sees his mother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for: an extended and somewhat graphic (?) depiction of a suicide attempt, a game of cards that I have put no effort into explaining the rules for, and a pretty shoddy action scene. 
> 
> i think just one more chapter after this! one more chapter and an epilogue at most.

_mid._

Two days after he buries Hobie, Theo sees his mother. He’s curled up on his bed in their apartment above the shop, the last night he’ll ever spend there, sick and shaking and sure that this time, this time he’ll die. 

That’d been his intention, anyway, when he downed all of the pills. He’d been portioning them out so carefully, for months, thinking he could make them last until things went back to normal. But he’d forgotten, somehow, that that isn’t how it works. Disaster strikes, people die, and normal never actually returns. You can put new brass pulls on a Hepplewhite highboy, but the wood knows what was there before. And the old owners, the people who loved and used it before they died and their grandchildren sold everything off - they would know the difference.

Theo knows the difference. He knows it in his bones, in his heart, in his teeth. The wasteland that separates what was and what is - an endless desert. On the horizon shine glimmering, beautiful moments. Stealing noodles from his mother’s container of chow mein during dinner. The weight of Boris’ head on his shoulder as they watch a film on Boris’ old tv. Pippa hugging him at the start of a school break, all the potential in the world hanging around them. Hobie humming as he makes coffee in the morning, tea at night, sorting through veneers, looking down at the account books and back up at Theo in happy disbelief. 

The worst part of slogging through the desert is that he can’t turn back to the past. He can only go forwards, arriving at every moment just to find that it’s a mirage. He passes right through it, and finds himself back in the desert. 

He’s so tired of the desert.

—

And there’s his mother. It’s hard to focus on her. At some point between washing down the pills with a third of a bottle of gluten free Stoli (the only fucking thing left on the shelves of the liquor store down the street) and now, he’s started moaning, a low, pained sound. He realizes, as she watches him with a kind of sad serenity, that he can’t actually stop. He realizes, as he watches her with what he would identify on the face of another person as awe, that he may actually die.

He doesn’t want to die. He wants to talk to her. He doesn’t want to waste his one opportunity to - his one opportunity -

—

(He has bad days. Of course he has bad days. The world ended; he’d be well within his rights to _only_ have bad days from hereon out. Instead, he tries to keep them to just a few days a month. Maybe once a week. No more than three days a week, maximum. 

“How do you do it?” he asks Boris one morning, over tea and a card game with rules Boris claims not to have made up. Theo is pretty sure it’s just a bastardized version of canasta.

“Do what?” Boris’ hand is currently absurdly huge, over twenty cards, and he’s been ‘organizing’ them for a few minutes now, absently digging a canine into his bottom lip.

“Keep going. When the world is like this, and your life is -“

“Like this?” Boris finishes with a wry snort. “Not an ideal situation, Potter, no.”

He finally discards a five of spades, then looks up from his cards and shrugs.

“It’s a very simple thing. I wake up, drink tea, eat, fall asleep. And then the next day -“

“I know how to physically keep myself alive, Boris. You know what I’m asking.”

“So you say,” Boris says, smile flickering across his face. “Big question. It’s your turn, you know.”

“You took five minutes to get rid of one card,” Theo complains, but he discards a three of diamonds immediately - red threes, no good - and lets Boris draw more cards and go back to his organizing.

“You’re not going to like my answer,” Boris concludes a few minutes later, as he lays down three queens, four sevens, and two kings and a two. His hand of cards has shrunken alarmingly. 

“Tell me anyway.”

“A question, first. Why do you think Mikael always gives me the heroin? Doesn’t even let me put the needle in myself?” 

It’s not a question Theo’s expecting. Boris discards another five without looking, tossing it half a foot away from the actual discard pile. Theo grabs it and puts it on the pile.

“Greg does too,” he says, instead of answering the question. The very idea of Greg, whom Theo has never even met, has been digging into his skin since Boris said his name with slurring lips. 

“Yes, and Greg,” Boris says impatiently, “Sure. But why do you think that is?”

“Power. Control over you. And -“ The words won’t come to his lips. _He likes to watch._

“And they get off on it, yes, but there’s something else,” Boris tells him, “Think.”

“I - I don’t know.”

He has an idea, but it doesn’t align with who Boris is in any way, and he doesn’t want to say it. Instead, he just looks down at his cards, pretending to contemplate whether he should discard a four or a five.

Boris snorts when he finally gets rid of the four of hearts, and says, “Fine. The simple answer, then. Things have been worse than they are now. I have good tea, windows that face east, and a good friend.”

Theo feels himself flush at that, and he feels very fond of Boris as he draws three more cards - until Boris continues, “A good friend who is very bad at cards. Foot!”

“Oh, you fucker!” Theo exclaims, and in the resulting mad dash to get rid of his cards before Boris can win the round, he entirely forgets to ask what the complex answer to the question is.)

—

It’s meant to go like this: Boris steals the key to his apartment from Greg, and he and Theo sneak out via the conveniently unguarded indoor fire escape, avoiding the armed doorman on the first floor and making it back to Theo’s apartment before the sun rises. 

In hindsight, Theo can’t believe he thought it’d ever go that smoothly. 

—

The thing that Theo forgets about is Ivan’s gun.

He doesn’t forget about it, exactly. He’s aware of it every time he comes to see Boris, the dull gleam of it under the yellowing lights in the hall, half-hidden by a jacket. But Ivan stops casually, warningly displaying it with a shrug or a stretch after Theo’s first few visits, and it becomes commonplace, like the National Guard in the streets and brownouts and Theo’s silent apartment. 

—

Ivan isn’t meant to be a part of the plan at all. They’d timed Boris’ escape for early morning, when he was only on guard if someone had spent the night with Boris. 

(“He has an apartment next door, and is very light sleeper. But I think we can be quiet for five minutes, no? Long enough to get to the fire stairwell?”

“_I_ can be quiet for five minutes,” Theo says, and Boris lets out a rusty but familiar ha!, playing his part in the machine of normalcy that Theo tries to set into motion whenever he sees Boris. Normal like too-sweet tea and plausible deniability and Boris finding amusement in the strange turning of the world.)

—

The trouble begins when Theo taps twice on Boris’ door and no one comes out. He waits a few minutes and taps again, the worst case scenarios running through his head. They’re mostly informed by the rotting corpse he’d seen sprawled across the first steps of the stairwell, which he presumes is meant to deter most would-be trespassers and escapees. 

The trouble continues when he hears the thud of something falling to the floor in Boris’ apartment. Boris finally emerges a few minutes after that, a backpack over his shoulder, looking disoriented. 

“Is someone else in there?” Theo can’t see anything over Boris’ shoulder, the lights in the apartment are all off.

“No, is just me,” Boris mutters. “Passed out on the couch after Greg left.”

_Fucking Greg_, Theo thinks, watching Boris close the door with gingerly precise movements.

They hurry down the hall, but they’re still fifteen feet away from the fire escape when Theo hears a door opening behind them, and the unmistakable sound of the hammer of a gun being pulled back.

“Stop!” Ivan says, and Theo turns to see Ivan standing outside the door to his apartment, pistol aimed at Boris. 

“Ivan, let’s be reasonable,” Boris begins, and Ivan sighs. 

“You know that I can’t let you leave, Boris. Mikael does not want you leaving, and so you can’t. Simple as that.”

“And you know that I can’t stay,” Boris says, matter of fact, and Ivan sighs again. 

“You couldn’t wait to escape at a decent hour?”

“If I’d known you were going to wake up, I would have waited longer,” Boris says, and Theo can see a genial expression on his face that matches Ivan’s, a kind of shallow sympathy. 

It vanishes as Ivan aims the gun at Theo.

“We have two options here, Borya,” he says. “You can come down the hall, and we each get to go back to bed and forget this happened. Or I can shoot your boyfriend in front of you, then call Mikael and let him take care of you. I don’t think either of us wants the second option.”

“No,” Boris says, stepping in front of Theo, his backpack bumping against Theo’s chest, “we don’t.”

Theo brings a hand up to Boris’ shoulder instinctively, ready to push him out of the way of the gun pointed directly at him, but the movement shifts his own gun, tucked under his coat in the waistband of his pants, and he realizes that Boris has given him the perfect cover to pull it out.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” Ivan says. Boris lets out a bark of laughter.

“You sound like a cop on TV,” he says, and Ivan fires.

He misses the first time, which is what probably ends up saving them, because it gives Boris a moment to shove Theo out of the way, which means when Ivan fires again and hits Boris’ arm, Boris shouts and staggers back and falls onto the floor, not onto Theo. And it means that when Ivan turns to shoot Theo, he’s already pushed himself up and fired his own gun. 

Theo doesn’t miss. 

_post._

“Oh fuck, _fuck_,” Boris snarls. His right hand is pressed over his left bicep, and blood already starting to coat his fingers.

Theo can barely hear him over the ringing in his ears, the clatter of their feet on the stairs, and the painfully heavy beat of his heart. Four stories above them, Ivan is splayed on the hallway floor, but the image of his body feels utterly unimportant compared to the sight of Boris pushing through the door into the open air, the iron blue light of pre-dawn canting across his face. 

“Are you okay?” Theo manages to ask through the noise, and Boris laughs, pained but giddy.

“It’s just a graze, Potter,” he says, and laughs again.

High on adrenaline and the feeling of Boris next to him, in motion, Theo can’t help but laugh, too. And so they run, laughing and bleeding, down the street towards Theo’s apartment and into the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- "iron blue" dawn is stolen from the Mountain Goats' song "Blood Royal."
> 
> \- the card game Theo and Boris play is called hand and foot, and it's definitely the best card game that requires five decks of cards.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the few minutes it takes for Boris to return with keycards, Theo works himself up to a thin, exhausted worry over the interaction to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the end of this fic the other day and am just filling in the middle now...we're almost there, folks! But first, Kansas.

_post._

The road stretches out to the horizon, bisecting a vast field of rotting wheat. They’re in Kansas, Theo thinks, or somewhere around there. At some point the mountains of the east tumbled down into hills, and the hills have become waves only barely perceptible through the grain covering them. 

Theo hasn’t slept more than a few hours in the last four days, parking the car down long abandoned service. roads and drifting away for a few minutes at a time, returning with blood on his tongue and dust in his throat. He’s kept the radio on, the same station growing improbably clearer the further west he drives, and the music and the land and the feeling of the steering wheel under his hands have all melted together, a stultifying backdrop to the only living thing in the car: Boris.

Boris wavers in and out of uneasy sleep more often than Theo does, sweating and shivering in the backseat, misery mixed with real sickness on his face. Despite Theo’s fears, however, the clonidine seems to keep the worst symptoms at bay, and his pulse stays steady. On the third day, Theo’s glances back are returned more often than not, Boris blinking up at him watchfully. He tries to look back less. 

On the fourth day, when Theo stops to fill up the tank with a gas can from the trunk, Boris moves himself from the back to the passenger seat. He smiles wanly at Theo as he starts the car. 

“How’re you feeling?” Theo asks, voice scratchy from disuse and an insistent headache throbbing behind his eyes. 

“Better than you look, I think,” Boris says, sounding similarly thready, and Theo can’t think of anything to say to that, so he just drives.

It’s quiet at first, and then Boris starts rustling through bags to look for food, eating half a sleeve of crackers in just a few minutes, occasionally holding one annoyingly close to Theo’s face until he takes a hand off the wheel to grab it. After that, Boris looks out the window for a while, offering remarks on the dull landscape, Theo’s dissatisfyingly slow speed, and how bad the car smells.

“I’m rolling down a window, Christ,” he says, ignoring Theo when he shakes his head, and then shortly afterwards, “Blyat, it smells like shit out there!”

“It’s the grain rotting,” Theo says absently, as Boris cranks the window back up.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Boris says, but unlike every time he’s said that before in the last week, this time it’s for show. 

He turns the radio up after that, right as an out-of-tune violin fuzzes out of the speakers.

“Sounds like your bands,” he murmurs, and Theo bristles at that comparison, as much as one can bristle when they’re so exhausted. Belatedly, he thinks about defending the Velvet Underground, making some argument about the artistic merit of John Cale not tuning his instruments, but Boris has already turned the radio up louder and is humming along.

_I remembered you_   
_I remembered all the things that you said_   
_I remembered the shape of your face,_   
_I let the thought go to my head_

He sings the last few repetitions of the final words, his voice soft and clear under the distortion of the radio, blood royale, blood royale. His hair is falling over his eyes, looking as tangled and unruly as it had when they were younger. Theo tries to wrench his attention back to the road.

—

Some time later, Boris begins insisting that they switch seats. 

“Do you even know how-“ Theo begins, and then cuts himself off with a yawn.

“See, Potter, you’re going to get us both killed if you keep driving! I have seen you fall asleep three times now.”

“I haven’t fallen asleep,” Theo insists, and Boris snorts.

“Okay, then you’re just a terrible driver. Jerking the wheel all over the place -“

“Fuck off,” Theo says, although he thinks it’s likely that he might have fallen asleep for a few seconds at some point, back in Missouri.

Boris subsides for all of a minute, then starts again.

“At least pull over so we can both sleep,” he says, “and shower. Maybe shower and then sleep.”

“Believe it or not, there aren’t a lot of hotels still open, Boris. The world ended, remember?”

“Oh, I never noticed,” Boris snaps, sarcastic but it makes Theo wonder. Boris had never been clear on how long he’d been in that apartment. Maybe he had never noticed; maybe the primary difference between life before and after was that the men who came started paying in gold. 

—

It’s that thought, closed doors and life only seen out of windows, that makes Theo take the exit for a Motel 6. It’s one of the big ones, three stories tall and three or four separate buildings. He parks at the far end of the one furthest from the check-in office on instinct, doesn’t think it strange until Boris asks, “What are you doing, Potter?”

Theo sits, one hand reaching for the keys in the ignition, and blinks muzzily at the flat white and blue front of the building. 

“Were you going to break into a room?” Boris sounds almost impressed, but he’s smiling incredulously when Theo looks over at him. 

Of course he had been. That’s how you got by in the city. Mortality rates of up to 30% in some neighborhoods, and the same number or more had just fled - check-in counters and leases no longer applied in that world. He’d broken into plenty of homes and cars in the city, and he’d never really questioned it.

“I…” he starts, but doesn’t know how to finish it. Something about the question, about Boris asking it, is making him feel lightheaded. He’s having a conversation here, with Boris, thousands of miles from anywhere they’ve ever been, from the emptiness of Vegas and New York, and they’re together. He’s feeling it all hit now that he doesn’t have to walk through city streets alone again. Boris is by his side, and they’re in a new world. All the worry, the major and minor irritations that come with Boris, they pale in comparison to that silent, lonely dread that settled deep in his bones after Hobie’s death.

He can’t explain it to Boris, but Boris seems to know anyway, an understanding in his smooth brow and dark eyes.

“I’ll go to the desk,” Boris offers. “You look like you’d pass out on the way there.”

“Fine,” Theo manages to say, and he turns off the car, feeling his own relief reflected in the silence of the engine and the radio cutting off mid-song: _What we did, the things we said -_

—

In the few minutes it takes for Boris to return with keycards, Theo works himself up to a thin, exhausted worry over the interaction to come. Going into a motel room with another man, with Boris, not to mention the beds, or the nightmares, or his dream of Boris -

But he’s underestimating the extent of his fatigue. Boris comes back with two keycards and none of the cash Theo had given him, half a smile on his mouth. The room has a conspicuously empty spot on the dresser where a TV used to be, and two beds. Boris doesn’t quite look at him when he mutters, “Going to wash off,” and Theo falls asleep on top of the covers, still wearing his shoes, right as the shower turns on.

—

He dreams about Vegas, a night that might or might not have happened. They’re sitting on a dune watching illegal fireworks on the Fourth of July, and vodka warmth is competing with the searing heat of Boris’ knee knocking against his. Boris had brought ecstasy, and at this point in the evening Theo’s skin is beginning to feel like its own entity, hungry and magnetic, pulling him towards Boris.

“_Americans_,” Boris says, in admiration for once, as gold and green sparks explode across the sky and mix with the stars for an instant before plummeting down. 

Theo watches him watch the sky, nudges him, and Boris pushes back with force, boney shoulder pressing into him. The scuffle that ensues eventually leads to Theo tumbling down the dune, Boris throwing himself joyfully down after him. He loses his glasses in the fall, and the world spins in three different directions, Boris and the fireworks and the impartial stars. The air gets cold, but Boris is still hot, pressed against him, on top of him, and there are sparks flying out of his fingers, sparks flying through the air, sparks behind Theo’s eyes. 

—

He wakes up to an empty room. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Boris sings along to is "Blood Royal" by the Mountain Goats, and the song that gets cut off when they get to the Motel 6 is "There Will Always Be an Ireland," also by the Mountain Goats. This fic may in fact be a poorly disguised ad for the Mountain Goats.
> 
> [tumblr](http://leguin.tumblr.com/)


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Briefly, Theo wonders how they’d ended up there, but he already knows the answer: this is always where they’ve been headed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're really and truly almost there now, folks. Just an epilogue left after this. 
> 
> Warnings for discussion of past suicide attempts.

_post. _

Theo wakes up to an empty room. That he is the only person in it is not the first thing he notices, because he doesn’t remember that it’s now notable. No, the first thing that he notices is the flat darkness of the room, and then the smell of cigarettes on the bedspread his face is pressed against. It’s only as he sits up, remembering the events of the last week, that he realizes that the room is empty - and it should not be.

He calls out for Boris softly, but knows even as he does so that Boris hasn’t simply stepped into the bathroom, or inexplicably fallen asleep in the tiny closet. He’s gone.

And Theo is alone again.

  
_pre. _

“Let’s go out,” Boris says as he emerges from his father’s house with two beers in hand, Popchik on his heels. 

“Go out where,” Theo says from the swimming pool steps where he’s settled in a quickly narrowing patch of late afternoon February sun. 

“_Out_,” Boris says, handing Theo a beer so he can gesture expansively at the empty subdivision around them, and the desert past that. “Was thinking dancing, maybe.”

“Dancing,” Theo repeats incredulously. Boris is still standing, looking out into the desert. “We don’t _go out dancing_, Boris, what the fuck.”

“Kotku told me-“ Boris starts, and Theo can’t help the scoffing laugh that follows. Kotku, of course. It’s always Kotku these days. Theo had actually been surprised when Boris had followed him off the bus, slinging an arm around his shoulder in a way that made Theo feel frustratingly small, saying, “I need a drink, Potter, c’mon,” surprised and pleased, but of course it’d all just been a set up. 

“I’m not going out dancing with Kotku,” Theo says, fixing his eyes on a beer bottle they’d left in the empty pool. 

“You don’t even know her, Potter,” Boris says, finally sprawling out next to him on the steps. Popchik, Theo notes with excess annoyance, settles down right next to him. “Give her a chance.”

“I know _about_ her,” Theo snaps, because he does, he’d asked questions of a few particularly gossipy classmates in Chemistry and US History, the two classes he had without Boris, and then he’d stopped asking when their expressions turned from conspiratorial to vaguely pitying, but in the interim he’d learned more than enough about Kotku. 

“See, this is your problem, Potter,” Boris says, and Theo rolls his eyes. “You never give anyone a chance. You look at them and decide you know everything about them. Xandra, your father, Kotku, who is a beautiful soul and you refuse to even speak to her. It’s your worst quality.”

“Jesus Christ,” Theo says, standing up. “I didn’t come here to have you talk up Kotku again. She’s _your_ girlfriend, Boris.”

“And you are my friend! Is it a wrong thing to want you to get along? I don’t think it is.”

This is, unfortunately, an eminently reasonable point. 

“She doesn’t like me,” Theo subsides, sitting back down. Popchik, the traitor, hasn’t stirred from Boris’ side.

“You haven’t given her a chance to like you. You make a face whenever you see her, like this,” Boris grimaces absurdly, scrunching his eyebrows down unevenly and sticking his tongue out for good measure.

“Fuck off,” Theo says, but he can’t help laughing a little. 

“So you’ll come,” Boris says, pressing for a mile as soon as he sees an inch. “Kotku says there’s a good place downtown. Snack’s or Snakes, something stupid, but she knows the bouncer. We’ll get in, no problem.”

“Fine,” Theo says, and Boris fistpumps, an annoying expression he’s no doubt picked up from Kotku.

He grins at Theo and says, “We’re going to have a great time.”

—

They do not have a great time.

—

The bar is called Snick’s Place, but that’s hardly the most important fact about it. 

“Boris,” Theo hisses, “this is a- the door is painted rainbow.” 

“Hmm,” Boris says - evasively, in Theo’s opinion. “Yes, so?”

_So, it’s a trap_, Theo thinks, although he doesn’t know where the thought comes from. Boris is wearing his dark blue sweater, the ones with holes he’s made in the sleeves for his thumbs. He looks impatient, like he’s fine with this. Like it’s Theo who has a problem.

“I’m leaving,” Theo says. Kotku, who’s been talking to her bouncer friend (a very tall, broad woman with short hair, _of course_), turns to look at him with raised eyebrows.

“Potter, don’t be stupid. We haven’t even gone inside,” Boris says, and Theo laughs, high and sharp, and considers, very briefly, making a run for it. 

Instead, he looks at Boris for a long moment, trying to figure out why, _why_, then turns on his heel and walks away. It takes two hours to get back home on the bus; he swings between fury and some deep, sick, squirming feeling he can’t name the whole way.

The next morning, he and Boris sit next to each other silently through English and lunch. Eventually Theo breaks the ice with an offer for dinner - Xandra is bringing home the remains of some staff lunch meeting, does Boris want him to save the chicken, and they don’t talk about the night before. They don’t talk about it, and Boris spends more and more time with Kotku. And they don’t talk about it.

_post._

Theo had been too tired to really see the motel when they’d arrived, and he’s struck by exactly how grimy it is, inside their room and out. The windows are streaked with dust, and there’s a small, rotting animal by the empty ice machine. 

He’s not really expecting the clerk at the front office to know where Boris has gone, but he is expecting there to be someone at the desk. There isn’t. The office is empty - the door itself has been smashed open, he realizes, and the ceiling light is burned out. The computer is still running, and Theo finds, when he looks behind the desk, a stack of blank keycards and the machine for encoding them. Boris must’ve made the keys for their room, must’ve taken the money Theo had given him and - what? Started out across Kansas to find a dealer?

He goes back outside and keeps walking around the motel buildings for lack of anything better to do, feeling like an idiot. A child. He knew from bitter experience that withdrawal didn’t mean the end of addiction. He shouldn’t’ve fallen asleep. He’s still exhausted, a few hours of rest nowhere near enough to feel really awake, and he feels stretched thin, like he’s being made to jump back and forth over a chasm with no end in sight. A life with Boris in it, a life without Boris. The city, the blood, his empty, stolen apartment, the drugs. The overwhelming smell of rotten wheat like sewage, and the sky, open over his head, and dusty, abandoned rooms. The inconstancy terrifies him. He wants something, somewhere, someone to keep.

—

He hears the sound of a door opening before he sees it - the heavy click of the lock and the electronic beep, the door sliding across carpet. Right as he rounds the corner of the building, he realizes that his gun is in the car.

And then it doesn’t matter, because standing in the doorway, his back to Theo, bag slung over one shoulder, is Boris. 

Theo must make some kind of sound, because Boris turns immediately, half-flinching, and relaxing only a little as he recognizes Theo.

“Potter, you scared me,” he says, and Theo raises his eyebrows.

“I scared you? I thought you left!”

“Where would I go?” Boris asks, turning back to the room. “No, Potter, just looking. Seeing if anyone left in a hurry.”

“Oh,” Theo says. 

“_Oh_,” Boris repeats mockingly. “You worry about too much. Come help me look.”

—

Boris, as it turns out, had made keycards for every room in the motel while Theo slept, although he didn’t label half of them, and the other half are superfluous, the rooms ransacked long before they arrived. Despite that, they manage to fill up a few bags with clothes, a six pack left in a minifridge, two full first-aid kits that Theo grabs with relief, a bottle of peppery cologne that Boris drenches them both in, insisting Theo needs it. And finally, in a bedside drawer, what Theo guesses Boris had been looking for all along: a bag of assorted pills, a riot of unnaturally bright color. He doesn’t try to hide them from Theo, just picks the bag up and smiles, says, “Remember Xandra’s Vicodins? In a bag like this? Amateur.”

They go back to their room with full arms, staying just long enough to dump everything on a bed. Then Boris grabs the two hideous chairs in the room, the six pack, and the pills, and goes back outside. 

Theo collapses into his chair, which creaks suspiciously, and takes the beer Boris offers him. Hesitates when Boris holds up the bag of pills.

“Don’t tell me you don’t…” Boris starts, looking disbelieving, and Theo shrugs.

“Not for a while,” he admits. “I stopped?”

Boris looks like he really doesn’t believe him.

“I stopped,” Theo repeats, definite this time, “I had to stop. I ran out.”

“Lots of places to get pills in the city,” Boris says, a curious expression on his face. “Greg would’ve sold them to you.”

Theo doesn’t want to continue, but he can feel something fragile in the moment, in the way that Boris hasn’t taken any pills himself. There’s a precarity that comes from being out in the open.

“I overdosed,” he says, finally, unable to look at Boris as he says it. “After Hobie died. I took everything I had, and drank everything I could, and I…”

He trails off, shrugging a little. Glances at Boris to see him looking sad, but not surprised.

“I saw my mother,” he confesses. “There was a moment, when I looked up and saw her watching me and I couldn’t - I wanted to talk to her, but by then I was, I couldn’t talk. I fucked it up. She was there, finally, and I wasted it.”

“Potter,” Boris says quietly, but Theo shakes his head, digs his fingernails into his palms.

“I wanted to talk to her,” he says again, “I know I could’ve, if I hadn’t. If I wasn’t-“

And then, Christ, he’s crying, and Boris is looking at him with a terrible pity. He reaches out across the foot of space separating their chairs, puts a hand on Theo’s forearm and brushes his thumb against it, darting over bare skin at the place where Theo’s shirt cuff is unbuttoned.

“Don’t,” Theo says, dragging his hand across his cheeks, trying to stop the tears, but Boris doesn’t move.

“Is nothing to be ashamed of,” he tells Theo, voice gentle but serious. “In this world? Who hasn’t thought about it, at the least?”

Theo tries to clear his throat and laughs wetly. Boris’ hand is still on his arm, warm and solid. Grounding.

“You wouldn’t,” he says. “You were never like that. Sometimes I think about Vegas, I dream about it, and you were so…”

Brave isn’t the right word, because he’s seen Boris be strategically cowardly dozens of times, but he doesn’t know what else to call it.

“Unafraid,” he settles on. “I was always the scared one.” 

Boris leans back, taking his hand away, and laughs at that, a bitter-sounding laugh.

“It’s kind of you to say, Potter,” he says, shaking his head, “but you must know it’s not the truth. Me! Never afraid!”

“You weren’t!” Theo says, insistent, trying not to feel the way cool air has settled over where Boris’ hand was. 

“I’m telling you, I was,” Boris says, crossing his arms and wincing a little at the movement. “Different things, maybe, but if you think I was never scared, in that apartment? Never scared after you left and I was alone? I have been terrified for my life more than once.”

“I don’t -“ Theo starts, but Boris talks over him.

“What’s more,” he says, properly argumentative now, “I have also tried to do what you did. A few months before you came.”

Theo blinks at him, utterly disbelieving. 

“And you don’t believe me,” Boris says, “I can see that you don’t. But why not? You don’t have a monopoly on despair, Potter.”

“Because you were never like that! You were never -“ _like me_, Theo doesn’t finish. Boris just stares at him, mouth tight. The beers, the pills, everything has been forgotten. Briefly, Theo wonders how they’d ended up there, but he already knows the answer: this is always where they’ve been headed.

“Listen,” Boris says. “You’re right, I wasn’t like that. Not before. But you changed me, in those years we were together. When I was with you, I understood the full extent of my heart. And when you left I realized how lonely I could be. I don’t say this to make you feel sorry, but because I need you to understand that we have both changed. We are not children anymore, Potter, and this is not a bad thing. Painful, maybe, but not bad. It’s true, I would not have tried to kill myself, not when you were there. But half a year ago? Months before I saw you? Mikael did not have such a tight leash on me, then, and I took advantage of that. Shot myself up with enough heroin to kill a horse. It was Ivan who found me, just in time.”

“I killed him,” Theo says, throat tight. He’s been watching Boris through all of this, can’t take his eyes away. Something is building in him, some vast, unnameable feeling wrapping around his ribs. It hurts to breathe, it hurts to think that Boris had been hurt as badly as he had. It hurts to finally begin to understand how Boris has changed.

“Yes,” Boris is saying, “because he was going to kill us! Don’t feel bad about that. You know, if Mikael hadn’t kept a closer eye on me, I would have tried again and I would have succeeded. You would have shown up at the apartment and there would be no one there. We would have been lost to each other.”

He reaches out again, putting his hand on Theo’s, this time, and Theo understands the gesture for what it is: trust. It has to be earned now with Boris, that trust, and Boris wants him to know that he has it.

Boris smiles at him, something almost hesitant about the expression.

“I think neither of us wants to regret the other,” he says, and Theo can only nod, not trusting himself to speak.

“Okay then,” Boris says quietly, almost to himself. “Okay. Drink your beer.”

Theo pulls away to grab the bottle, and Boris leaves his hand on the armrest like an invitation. Theo doesn’t take it, but he smiles back at Boris, and hopes he knows that he appreciates it. He thinks Boris understands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snick's Place was a real bar - the oldest gay bar in Vegas, until it closed a few years ago. It did have a rainbow door, but it probably never had bouncers who would've let Theo, looking all of ten years old, in. Hopefully.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They can go anywhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The final chapter. Gosh. I don't know what to say, except that writing this has been quite a learning experience, which is the most I can hope for with anything I write. 
> 
> My sincere thanks to everyone who's encouraged me in this along the way, especially [KatherineBarlow](https://katherinebarlow.tumblr.com/), who among other things suggested that perhaps Theo and Boris had gone through enough in this fic and needed a happy ending. You were right (although I may have taken it too far).
> 
> You can find some additional thoughts on this fic, inspirations, etc, [here](https://leguin.tumblr.com/tagged/notes%20from%20a%20catastrophe).

“There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty.”  
  
\- Mary Oliver, “Don’t Hesitate"

_post. _

Boris goes out at odd hours, lays on the hood of their car smoking cigarettes and looking up at the sky, circles watchfully around the motel at three in the morning, comes back to their room with red cheeks and freezing cold fingers that he threatens to warm under Theo’s shirt. It’s been three days since they stopped at the motel, and something in Theo balks at the idea of continuing forward. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. For once, Theo doesn’t feel like staying still means suffocating.

—

Theo dreams about the painting, every detail etched clear by grief. The weight of it in his hands. The chain encircling a delicate leg. The look in the goldfinch’s eye, alien, challenging him in a language he does not understand. 

He wakes up with a warm weight pressed against him, a body that had not been there when he fell asleep. Boris, face pressed against his back, an arm slung over his side. Belatedly, the closeness sends a jolt through him; as he shifts away, uneasy with want, Boris stirs and then goes very still. Frozen, for a moment, then a rapid unthawing. Theo can feel the sweep of eyelashes against his bare shoulder, and Boris’ chapped lips as he murmurs, “Oh, Theo. Is just you.”

“Just me,” Theo says, undergoing a thawing freeze of his own. 

“I always know,” Boris sighs, somewhat nonsensically. He lets Theo turn onto his back, then buries his face in his shoulder and drops away into sleep before Theo can come to terms with anything. He lays awake in the dark until a sliver of dawn light pushes past the curtains, revealing to the world Boris next to him, and thinks, _I told you I loved you_, and considers what it means. By the time Boris wakes up again, startling back into consciousness with a groan, he still hasn’t figured anything out.

—

A flash of silver catches Theo’s eye when he walks outside later that morning - Boris’ cigarette case, which Boris is restlessly flipping open and closed.

“Time to go, I think,” he says, looking past Theo.

“Go?” Theo asks, dumbly, and Boris just nods, still not looking at him.

“Can’t stay here. No cigarettes, no vodka, and no food, soon enough. Plus, winter is coming, Potter.”

Theo squints at him, trying to figure out if it’s a deliberate reference, but Boris is all avoidance and nerves, hard to read.

“Okay,” he says finally, “we’ll go.”

For some reason, Boris scoffs at this. He crosses his arms, cigarette case still clutched in one hand, and finally looks at Theo.

“Leave, just like that.” His voice is flat.

“Yes,” Theo says, the word more uncertain than he means it to be, and Boris just shakes his head and turns away abruptly in the crisp afternoon air.

“So fucking _simple_,” he says, voice uneven, and Theo, watching his tight shoulders, suddenly understands. It’s not about the leaving. It’s about the being able to leave.

“Boris,” he says quietly, “It is that fucking simple. We get to decide when to go.”

Boris doesn’t turn respond, doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t move at all. Somewhere above them, a bird wheels in the air and shrieks.

—

Theo is packing when Boris comes in, rolling Boris’ sweaters into tight cylinders and putting them in a duffel bag. He feels like he needs to apologize to Boris, as though that will unwind the taut string of his body. As though anything can ever be undone.

“Think,” Boris begins, statuesque on the other side of the full-sized motel bed. He pauses, then starts again with a defensive edge to his voice. “Sometimes I think - what if it all happens again. Not fair to you, I know. I don’t believe it. Not really.”

Theo puts a particularly ragged maroon sweater in the duffel, pressing his index finger into a hole in the wool. He wonders how difficult it will be to learn how to darn. 

“Potter, I - I don’t think I should apologize,” Boris says, but his defensiveness is quickly being replaced by something else, something smaller, softer, and Theo looks up from the sweater in alarm.

“No,” he says quickly, “no, you shouldn’t. You don’t need to explain. I understand.”

“You’re afraid,” he continues, when Boris says nothing. “You said - we’re allowed to be afraid.”

“Yes,” Boris sighs, then attempts a smile. “As usual, I am right.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Theo says, letting himself smile back.

They work in relative silence for a while, Boris occasionally muttering to himself as he inventories and packs their dwindling supply of food. Theo reluctantly bags the tiny bottles of shampoo and body wash, but draws the line at Motel 6 soap. 

He’s zipping up the duffel bag when Boris asks, “Where are we going?”

There’s a hint of laughter in his voice, like he knows how ridiculous it is to ask the question at this stage of the journey, thousands of miles from their point of departure, but Theo can’t find it in himself to be amused. Instead, a sudden wave of nausea strikes him, and he has to clutch at the rough fabric of the bag to steady himself.

“Potter?”

“I’m okay,” he says, shutting his eyes against the sight of their packed bags, Boris’ face pinched with concern, the car visible through the window. He feels the sudden urge to apologize to someone who isn’t there.

“Not New York,” he says finally, and Boris lets out a startled laugh.

“Of course not New York, Potter!” he says. “We cannot go back there for a long time.”

Theo jumps at the feeling of Boris’ hand on his arm, a slow but sure touch, and he opens his eyes to see that Boris has abandoned the bags of food to come over to him - a question of just a few steps and a turn, in the small room. 

Boris runs his hand up and down Theo’s arm, shoulder to elbow. Theo’s wearing an undershirt, a sweater, and a jacket on top of that, but the touch burns right through the layers. It brings him round, and as the world begins to make a kind of sense again, Theo’s sweeping disorientation is replaced by a growing sadness.

“Okay, Potter?” Boris asks, seriously, his hand slowing and staying, and Theo nods.

“Do you remember when you asked me to leave with you? You wanted to go to California.”

Boris ducked his head, looking embarrassed. “Of course.”

“I never would’ve gone,” Theo admits. “I was always going to go back to New York.”

“I know,” Boris says. “Why do you think I asked?” Then, realization dawning, “Oh, Potter. Your mother.”

Theo tries to swallow past the growing lump in his throat and nods. He’s reminded, every moment with Boris, how terrifying it is to be understood. How much easier life becomes when you can be heard without speaking.

Still, he feels the need to be clear, for Boris to know that he has no true regrets:

“It’s where she lived,” he says quietly, “so I had to go back. It’s where she lived, and it’s where Hobie lived, and it’s where they died.”

He looks down at the duffel bag and the bedspread below it. There’s a cigarette burn on the white cover, a neat brown hole. Had it been left by him or Boris? Or someone else, uncaring, months ago?

“You feel guilty,” Boris says, and he sighs.

“Even after you told me not to,” Theo says wryly, which makes Boris laugh.

“I’ll tell you again,” he says, “many times, I think. It’s okay to change, Potter.”

Theo swallows and nods, goes to turn away to finish packing, but Boris presses firmly on his arm until he turns back.

“I have more to say,” Boris tells him. “You act like you have to be a, a,” he waves his free hand in the air, searching for the word, “a mausoleum for your mother. For Hobie. Like one day you’ll see them again and they won’t know you. But that is not going to happen. You see that, no?”

He looks at Theo with clear, earnest eyes, and places a hand on Theo’s chest.

“You have a good heart, Theo,” he says, utterly serious. “If you follow it, no matter where you go, your mother will know you.”

Theo can only stare at him, flushing from the words, the patience, the points of contact that Boris has made between them. He thinks about where Boris has gone, how’s changed. How despite everything, he is not a stranger. If he can trust Theo after everything - if his body can trust Theo’s, curling against him in the night, meaningless in the best possible way - if Theo can leave New York and the last remnants of his mother behind - if they can trust each other after all that, then there is something more to who they are than what they do in each moment. Infuriatingly, Boris is right about it all. Right too about what has gone unsaid - that _Boris_ will always know him, just as something in him knows Boris, has always known him, will always know him, no matter what happens next. 

They can go anywhere. Leave anywhere.

He imagines reaching out and touching Boris the way Boris touches him, so sure. He pictures it in his head, and then he does it, slowly, Boris watching as he places a hand on his chest. The very tips of his fingers brush against the bare skin of Boris’ throat, and he can feel himself flushing more at the way Boris doesn’t move away - leans in, even, closer to Theo. Closer, until Theo moves again, wrapping an arm around Boris and shuddering when Boris mirrors him, holds him, one arm around wrapped his back and a hand grasping the back of his neck. 

They’d never held each other like this in Vegas, daylight coming in through the window and no drinks, no pills in between them. Too afraid, too fucked up to be lovingly deliberate in their touch. And so Theo hasn’t known to want it like this, but somehow he’s wanted it anyway, because some warped part of him is beginning to feel whole again in Boris’ embrace. Boris, keeping him, anchoring him, murmuring low against Theo’s neck words he doesn’t yet know.

He can’t bring himself to respond, only presses his face against Boris’ hair and lets himself be there, in that moment, with Boris. And then in the next, and the next, and the next, until time begins to move again as it once had, relentlessly forward, bittersweet and beautiful, and Theo moves with it.


End file.
